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Quote:
Herko Coomans wrote:
WHoa.. that's like asking for a businesscase for your site. IMO that's what you should start with before you set up a site. However, here's some tips:
1. organise! Use the forum as a platform for organised discussions with experts, that last for a limited time (one day?).
2. don't just facilitate, but initiate! Don't present your visitors with a forum and topics to discuss, but initiate discussions with controversial posts and opinioned articles. People aren't driving because there are roads, but because they need to go somewhere...
3. activate! invite specific people to join in a specific discussin because of their (expert) opinions. You can also ask other organisations to initiate a discussion on your forums and ask them to invite their network.
These are just 3 tips from my experience. It works, but you have to work hard for this.
Herko
Thanks,
To reply your thoughts Herko, I have done the followings, if that is close to what you have suggested.
1. I go to lots of professional meetings and I had personally solicit people to post on my site.
2. I have initialed 50 topics on my site, some are controversial, its true, controversial topics gets more attention(view), but still not enough participation(post).
3. I have done that. But people in my field they prefer not to discuss openly online, they want phone calls instead.
In addition, I have joined google adwords, I did not spend a high per click $ amount because that will cost me $100+++/day. My thoughts are: If I can get Googles to deep spider my site quicker, perhaps I can get some traffic if the contents are exposed.
One thing I did to make my site more visible is to post advertising on the Newsgroups, it did work but at the cost of receive warnings from my ISP saying I was spamming.
Media campaign was done via fliers. In a local chamber of commerce, I included my flier to their monthly publication, but nothing happened.
I even started a FAX campaign, I sent out 500-1000 faxes. The results were not productive, I did get about 10 removal calls, nevertheless.
Any more suggestions?